Woooo last blog for a while 🙂 and almost Christmas. I am not a massive fan of Christmas because of the stupid Christmas songs and the fact that Christmas stuff comes out in the shops 2 months previous which is way too early. Anyway. “must the need for documented ethics procedure hinder research progress”.
Well lets start off with ethics. What are ethics?
Ethics is the study of proper action (Ray 2000).
All psychologist know the 10 ethical standards as they have to be performed when researching human participants.
The 10 ethical principles (http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx#)
1. No harm – taking steps to avoid harming their research participants and to minimize harm where it is foreseeable and unavoidable. When psychologist become aware that there participants have been harmed in the research, they take reasonable steps to minimise harm.
2. Privacy and confidentiality– psychologist take great care to protect confidential information. They discuss with person the relevant limits of confidentiality. They only discuss confidential information for appropriate scientific or professional purposes and only with persons clearly concerned with such matters. They may disclose confidential information with appropriate consent from the individual or other legally authorized person on behalf of the participant, unless prohibited to by law.
3. Institutional approval- psychologist give accurate information about their research proposals and obtain approval prior to conducting the research. They conduct research in accordance with the approved research protocol.
4. Competence– do research in where they are competent but if not undergo education, training, supervised experience, consultation or study.
5. Record keeping.
6. Informed consent to research.
7. Dispensing with informed consent- only dispense informed consent where research would not be assumed to create distress or harm.
8. Offering inducements for research participation– make reasonable effort to avoid offering excessive or inappropriate financial or other inducements for research participation when such inducements are likely to coerce participation.
9. Deception in research– do not conduct research involving deception unless they have determined that the use of deceptive techniques is justified by the study’s significant prospective scientific, educational, or applied value, and that effective non-deceptive alternative procedures are not feasible.
10. Debriefing– prompt opportunity for participants to obtain appropriate information about the nature, results and conclusion of research and to correct any misconceptions that participants may have about the experiment that the psychologist is aware about.
Ethics are very important when carrying out any research. We have all had to fill in an ethics form at some point. This then has to be approved by the school research ethics committee.
There are a few documents associated with the ethics committee saying that they hinder and delay research and even distort research.
http://www.bmj.com/content/329/7460/0.1.full
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4748884.stm
The ethics code is there for one reason and that is so research isn’t unethical. Before the ethics code was enforced, many researchers went too far with their experimentation. E.g. The little albert experiment.
John Watson exposed “albert” to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks, and burning newspaper. The boy at first showed no fear to any of the stimuli. John then made loud noises when albert touched the rat by banging a pipe with a hammer. Albert began to cry. He did this several times. After pairing the rat with the loud noise, albert cried just at the sight of the rat.
Watson and Reynor wrote “the instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on [his] left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.”
Watson and Reynor did not think of the consequence of what they were doing to the child. As after do this experiment with the rat. Little Albert started to generalise his fear response to anything fluffy, white or both. They did not desensitize Albert to his fear after the experiment.
The little Albert experiment is an example of how classical conditioning can be used to condition an emotion response. The 2 unconditioned stimulus was the loud noise and the fear.
Though ethic procedures hinder research progress there is an obvious need for them. People’s morals are completely different and without the ethics code there would be no clear line to what is ethical and what is not.
I agree, I think if there were no ethical guidelines in psychology, researchers would do anything they like as they would be able to get away with it. However, for research purposes it could be argued that ethics goes too far. I mean in a lot of cases participants need to be deceived in order for the results to be accurate, and if they had informed consent the research would be pointless. However, as there is a debrief the ethics is still okay. I guess, there are needs for ethics in research simply because we are dealing with people and we do not know what every person would do if every situation. Good blog though. 🙂
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I agree with you that the code of conduct is essential for psychological research. De Vaus (1985) said that confidentiality is a key factor in protecting participants “as this alone could be a defining line between whether a participant gets harmed or not”. Owners of Facebook have admitted to selling information about its users to the government. So although our personal details are hidden from other users through using ‘private’ profiles the government have obtained it….without our consent (Schneier,
2006). This just amplifies how important confidentiality is in psychological research as well as society. Ethics is important in protecting our participants but also for setting out a guideline for what is right and wrong.
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